So last evening, I went back and looked at my journal entries from those early years wondering if a fresh perspective might see something I missed when I read them last December.
From July of 2002 (when we met) until mid 2003 (before we moved in together), I wrote about a lot of insecurities and doubts. I talked about having low self-worth. I repeated several times that I didn't think I deserve him. I talked about how I need to stop running and that I have trust issues and have not truly trusted anyone since Beth in 8th/9th grade. I don't fully recall what I meant in saying I need to stop running.
I gushed on and on about his unconditional love and how I don't think I could ever love him the way he loves me (kind of ironic knowing where this blog post is going). I also thought his parents were absolutely amazing during this time. They were attentive and interested in me. They seemed to love and welcome me as one of their own. At the time, I had this perception that my own parents were uninterested in me so his parents' love seemed like a dream come true.
Within the first two months of dating, he was seriously talking a future together - what kind of house we wanted to buy, what we would do with our degrees, etc. Within five months, he was already talking about buying a ring and trying out how my first name would sound with his last name. I mention on more than one occasion that this all feels too good to be true.
Six months in I write about how I feel like my life is spinning out of control and decisions are being made too quickly. He's decided to forgo an internship with his undergrad degree and instead start his masters the following fall at my university. So as early as December of 2002 we were securing an apartment together for the fall of 2003.
We were long distance except summers during this time period. There are several times where I wrote that I appreciated the physical distance because it gave me space to think and get some clarity as it seems the time together was so intense.
We have one minor glitch when a mechanic does something wrong to his car and he is ready to go out and buy a new one instead of giving the mechanic a chance to try to fix it. It appears I talked him off that ledge. (That was my foreshadowing of a life of impulse car buys. I still remember the time he used the excuse that our car needed new windshield wipers so we might as well go out and buy a whole new car.)
In February of 2003, we took an online quiz "Are you ready to be loved?" and he scored a perfect score while I was embarrassed by my low score. I sought a lot of reassurance from him in this first almost year.
I still had doubts come April of 2003 when I started planning to propose to him although I had a lot of confidence in the moment of the proposal. When I got home that summer of 2003, I wrote about not sleeping well and crying but not understanding why.
And then we moved in together before the fall semester of 2003, and there was a huge shift within just a week or two. He had stopped ever treating me when we went out, each of us always paying our own way or paying out of the household joint account (which I think we contributed to equally). I wrote about only one time he brought flowers home and how weird the interaction was. He said someone was selling flowers at work so he bought them but then didn't say anything to let me know he thought of me or that they are for me or that they are because he loved me or anything like that. Even when I ask what the flowers are for, his only response was that someone was selling them. It's not that I needed flowers or anything like that, we were fairly poor college students. It's that any attempt to continue to date me is noticeably missing.
We were arguing about housework, sometimes because he wouldn't give me a chance to get to it and sometimes because he was refusing to do it and the burden then fell on me for a period of time. We were starting to run into issues where he wouldn't stand up for me to his parents and let them run right over us with each visit. That was true from their very first visit that October after we had just moved in together.
I wrote about how I felt there was an imbalance in how much emotional support I was providing him (which almost seems a bit of a flip from the time period before we moved in together). I'm handling all the administrative stuff - the portable dishwasher we bought that didn't work, the newspaper we subscribed to that didn't arrive, the maintenance issues with the apartment complex, the errors on our joint bank statements, finding a vet for our pet turtle (the pet he wanted) and then caring for the turtle, etc.
I didn't write a lot of entries during this time frame and the ones I do are mostly about school but when I write about him, they aren't overly positive entries. I think there were a lot of good times mixed in but I had limited time to write and when I did have time, it was just to process the bad. But regardless, the all in, love bombing man (and his parents) of our pre-move in days had disappeared and the man who had replaced him was doing more of the bare minimum.
Another thing that really stands out is that I no longer write anything at all about my own insecurities, doubts, or self-worth. It's like they just magically disappear. I actually am now the one gushing about how much I love him and how much he means to me. When things got real for him, he distanced himself. When things got real for me, I dug in deeper into the relationship.
So fast forward to that journal entry in January of 2004 that sent me down this path this weekend - he had distanced himself enough that even his car was more important than me. And I was writing that I loved him so much was willing to sacrifice for him.
I don't even know what to make of this. It just sounds so messed up and I'm not any closer to answering my question as to where my mind was at when I thought this was okay. Honestly, I'm probably further from that answer now because I think it was even more dysfunctional than I had initially remembered.
Honestly, before I found those journal entries, I had always believed that our honeymoon phase had lasted well into our marriage. I had remembered quite a few of those early years as really special and wonderful. But my journal entries don't quite paint that picture.
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